The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
ADAM GOPNIKThere are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIK